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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. .TCopyright No. 

Shelf:;. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE PATHS OF DUTY 



Counsels to goung i^lcn 



BY 



THE VERY REV. F. W. FARRAR. D.D. 



DEAN OF CANTKRBUKV 



MAR 6 1896, 



BOST.ON: ioo Purchase Street 

THOMAS V. CROWELL & COMPANY 

NEW YORK: 46 East 14TH Sikh i 






Copyright, 1896, 
By Thomas V. Crgwell & Company. 



J. PRTRRS & SON, TYPUGRAPHRRS, 

I ON. 



THE PATHS OF DUTY. 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. 

It happens frequently that a young man, after an 
interval of years, finds himself once more, for a time, 
in the old home of his childhood. He has gone to 
school as a young boy, and then only his holidays were 
spent at home. But after his school or college days 
are over, it is often his destiny to reside under the old 
roof, during the earlier part of his career, either in his 
father's business, or in some one of the many occupa- 
tions provided by great cities. Now, this renewal of 
the old home-life, under changed conditions, may be 
either very delightful, both to himself and to all his 
family, or it may be intolerably irksome. 

It will be delightful if, having learnt unselfishness 
and self-control, the youth brings back with him not 
only his mature strength and healthy frame, but also 
the flower of all the best morality which he has learnt 
from parents, teachers, and companions. 

It will be intolerable if he has not learnt the mean- 
ing of the lesson that no man liveth and no man dieth 
unto himself; and that the life of egotism and self- 
indulgence, though it has its root in pride and vanity, 
is worthy only of the animal, not of the man with the 

5 



6 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

dignity of God's image upon him, and the sign of his 
redemption marked visibly upon his forehead. In the 
bearing of the young man in his home there may be an 
exhibition of all fair humanities — of all that is courte- 
ous, pure, lovely, and of good report — of true manliness 
and beautiful chivalry ; or, on the other hand, an offen- 
sive display of paltry animalism and odious ingratitude. 
Concrete and real examples may, perhaps, give more 
definiteness to what I have to impress. 

But first I must pause to say a word to parents. 
They cannot be reminded too often, or too earnestly, 
not to fret, not to worry their children. That may 
sound like very homely advice ; yet it has been thought 
worthy of a place on the sacred page by the Apostle of 
the Gentiles. The clause, ko.l ol irarepes jxy) ipeOt^Te to. 
T€Kva v/aw, rendered in our A.V., "and ye fathers, pro- 
voke not your children to wrath," means exactly, " do 
he may be sure that, in nine cases out of ten, in promot- 
not irritate your children," " do not rub them up the 
wrong way." Parents must respect their children as 
well as children their parents. The whole sacredness of 
humanity lies in every human being; and it involves an 
independent individuality, a separate development. Our 
children are not, and cannot be, either pale or brilliant 
reflexes of ourselves. They have separate wills ; they 
are new and peculiar entities ; a whole eternity lies in 
them ; the soul of each of them is an island, and it is 
surrounded by an unvoyageable sea. We must recog- 
nize their separateness, and not try to cramp the form- 
ing crystal into an impossible mould, which would but 
flaw and ruin it. 

Obedience and love from their children are the happy 
due of all parents who have faithfully done their duty ; 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. J 

but the nature and the limits of the respect alter with 
the advancing years. There is such a thing as the un- 
natural repression of grown-up children by their par- 
ents, and the continuance of unfair demands upon their 
loyalty. And in the case of young men we have espe- 
cially to remember the ebullient life which for us has 
long passed away. We have to make allowance for the 
faults and tendencies which are as inherent in youth as 
they are in childhood. " Young men/' says Lord Bacon, 
" in their conduct and management of actions, embrace 
more than they can hold ; stir more than they quiet ; fly 
to the end, without consideration of the means and 
degrees ; pursue some few principles which they have 
chanced upon absurdly ; use extreme remedies at first, 
and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowl- 
edge or retract them." Over young men, therefore, we 
must aim to establish a wise influence, rather than a 
galling control ; and, without too obtrusive^a resort to 
didactics, we must lead them to feel the force of the 
warning of Ecclesiastes : " Rejoice, young man, in 
thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days 
of thy youth ; and walk in the ways of thy heart, and 
in the light of thine eyes: but remember" — and this 
memento is uttered rather in the spirit of genial kind- 
ness than of unsympathizing menace — " but remember 
that for 3II these things God shall bring thee into judg- 
ment. " 

Here, then, are specimens of some " young men at 
home," — faithful and unfaithful, obedient and disobe- 
dient, happy and unhappy, wise and unwise. 

1. I recall three who were, in succession, " young 
men in the same home." One was training to be a doc- 
tor j the second to be a civil servant ; the third to be a 



8 THE PATHS OF BUTT. 

clergyman. The home was sufficiently comfortable and 
well-to-do. but simple. It was so occupied with the 
round of ince s int duties as to leave less room than 
m'gat be desirable for the gi\; e and innocent amuse- 
ments of society. Yet each of those youtas in succes- 
sion resigned the games and cheerful society of boyish 
life ; fell quietly into the home routine. They worked 
heartily in their own rooms ; made themselves bright, 
happy, and contented ; tried faithfully to prepare them- 
selves for the battle of life, and the struggle to earn a 
living ; and never gave their parents an hour's anxiety 
by unreasonable demands, or extravagance, or dubious 
pleasures, or even by that reserve and reticence respect- 
ing their aims, pursuits, and friendships which may 
sometimes create heartburn and misgiving even where 
there is no reasonable ground for it. And so they 
passed away to life, or early death, leaving behind them 
good hopes and happy memories ; they left their homes 
to become " profitable members of the church and com- 
monwealth,'' and, hereafter, we hope, " partakers of the 
im nortal glories of the Resurrection." 

2. I recall another young man in his home — a very 
great and famous man whose name I must not mention. 
His was the case of a man of genius, born of parents who 
had no pretensions to genius at all, and who was incom- 
parably in advance of his parents in culture and educa- 
tion. Many a young man so circumstanced has been 
tempted to give himself airs ; to look down upon his 
parents as inferiors; to shudder when they drop their 
k's ; to condole with himself as the offspring of bourgeois 
or plebeian people, of whom he is obliged to be ashamed. 
Not so the young man of whom I speak. He had taken 
as his rule of life the highest of all ideals, — the ideal of 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. 



Him " who went down to his parents at Nazareth, and 
was subject unto them." I have sat at his table, and 
heard him pour forth the stores of his unexampled elo- 
quence, and unroll the treasures of his large heart, in 
lessons full of depth and beauty ; and then his dear 
old mother — a perfect type of English middle-class 
womanhood, with something of the holy Philistinism of 
a narrow creed which invests its humblest votaries with 
self-imagined infallibility — would lift up her monitory 
finger before the assembled guests and say, " Now, 
William," — we will call him " William," though that 
was not his name, — "listen to me." Then, while he 
and we respectfully listened, she would lay down the 
law with exquisite placidity, telling him how completely 
mistaken he was in these new-fangled notions : — 

" Proving all wrong that hitherto was writ, 
And putting us to ignorance again." 

" Yes, mother," he would say when her little admonk 
tion ended ; and then conversation would resume its 
flow quite undisturbed, and the dear old lady was more 
than satisfied. It was the greatness of her son's genius 
which made him so good a son. A smaller mind would 
have winced, or been contemptuous. "Men do not 
make their homes unhappy because they have genius," 
says Wordsworth, " but because they have not enough 
genius ; a mind and sentiment of a higher order would 
render them capable of seeing and feeling all the beauty 
of domestic ties." 

8 Vnother young man in his home! He was at 
col eg and had several young brothers at Eton, or 
pre x ^ring for Eton. He was not at all a saint, but he 
was a gentleman, and the one element which helped to 



10 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

make his life useful and honorable was his sense of duty 
towards his home. One day the brothers were sitting 
together, and no one with them but another young 
Trinity man, when one of the lads made use of a coarse 
word to a younger brother. Instantly the elder brother 
started up, and, without saying a word, gave. the boy a 
sound box on the ears, and turned him, then and there, 
out of the room. I am quite sure that the young 
Etonian learnt a lesson for life. He learnt that re- 
spect was due to his younger as well as to his elder 
brothers ; and that, if ever he could sink so low as to 
use coarse language, at any rate he should not do it in 
his father's house. 

4. Now in this instance we see one great sphere of 
influence which a young man may exercise in his home. 
He may be of the greatest use to his sisters by enabling 
them really to estimate the worth or the worthlessness 
of the young men who visit the home, and who may 
aspire to be their husbands ; but he may be of incalcu- 
lable use to his younger brothers. He has seen more 
of life than they have. They naturally look up to him 
for their views as to what things are, or are not, to be 
desired ; what things should or should not be pursued. 
I have known elder brothers who were a source of bless- 
in ■* and inspiration, and others who were a downright 
curse, to the younger memb3rs of their family. 

5. I think the elder brother of the Prodigal must 
have been a^specimen of the latter class, — not, indeed, 
by any directly perverting influence, but negatively, I y 
the selfishness which was incapable of forbearance and 
sympathy. Absorbed in his own laborious virtues, he 
despised the young ne'er-do-weel, his brother, and let 
him take his own line, without troubling himself to 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. \\ 

guide or love. But for him. and his hard immaculate- 
ness, unsociability, and lack of love, the Prodigal might 
ne> r have become a prodigal ; and since he had no love 
for ai y one but his estimable self, it is no wonder that 
wl he poor youth came back, hungry, degraded, and 
in igs, the elder brother, so far from sharing in his 
father's joy over the son who had been dead and was 
alive again, who had been lost and was found, had 
nothing for the occasion but unforgiving jealousy, cold 
sneers, and harsh exaggerations. Such young men are 
an alien influence in the homes where they abide. 

And what, a fatal loss they suffer! For, as Mr. W. 
H. Mallock says, " A man's home, his family, his means 
of livelihood, — these are the chalice which holds the 
sacramental wine of Lis life ; and if we allow the chal- 
i 3 to be soiled or leaky, the wine will be defiled or 
w sted. God wills that it should not be wasted. . . . 
If we are responsible w r hen we make our brother to 
offend, are we not equally responsible if we make him 
to offend by leaving him in conditions where nothing 
but offence is possible ? " 

6. But I know an elder brother very different from 
this, who has been an inestimable blessing to all of his 
family. He and they were left orphans, and theie were 
several young boys, as well as the girls, who had to be 
started in life. Without a murmur, in complete self- 
sacrifice of his own hopes and his own interests, this 
young man undertook the entire responsibility of his 
family. He gave up all present thoughts of marrying, 
or surrounding himself with the comforts and pleasures 
which might otherwise have been in his power. He re- 
garded the younger orphans as his sacred charge, and 
even now is toiling on to supply them with the means 



\ 



12 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

and the opportunities of which they had been deprived 
by the loss of their parents. How invaluable is the 
work of such a young man in his home ! how high the 
reward which his unselfishness should earn, when his 
brothers and sisters rise up and call him blessed ! " The 
essence of greatness," says Emerson, " is the perception 
that virtue is enough." " If the home duties be well 
performed," so wrote Confucius some twenty-five hun- 
dred years ago, " there is no need to go afar to o i;er 
sacrifice." 

7. The experience of life brings before us, alas ! bad 
examples as well as good. I recall young men whose 
inconsiderateness and misconduct made home unendur- 
able alike to their families and to themselves. They 
would have their latchkeys ; they would be out to any 
hour they liked ; even if they were engaged in things 
not necessarily harmful, and with friends not necessarily 
pernicious, they would not deign to share their thoughts 
or their proceedings with the home circle, and did not 
greatly care if they surmised the worst. Their silence 
was more cruel than bitter words. I have known such 
a state of things end in the abomination of mutual 
quarrels, and even of deplorable scenes, between sons 
and fathers, until it became impossible for them to live 
at all under the same roof. The prodigals went their 
way, perhaps to lose all and forfeit everything, and to 
end by earning scant and laborious livelihoods under 
harder conditions than those of the ordinary English 
laborer, and with barely, perhaps, even the prospect of 
a workhouse at the close. I have known them make 
miserable marriages, squander their inheritance, and 
shatter every high hope which had once been formed 
for them. I have known them come back from the 






THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. 13 

antipodes, wretched and penniless, and yet walk again 
and again before the door of their parents, afraid, and 
ashamed to knock or to lift the latch, not knowing what 
welcome would await them, afraid even that they might 
be altogether and deservedly repulsed. And the most 
frightful cases of all have been the cases of young men 
left m the homes of widowed mothers. What can a 
poor widowed mother, struggling for bare existence, do 
with sons who, living under her roof, choose to be wild 
and unruly ? She may have been a good mother, but if 
her sons are not to be controlled or coerced by the 
indefeasible sacredness of motherhood, — if they for- 
sake the guide of their youth, and forget the covenant of 
their God, — if in the twilight, in the evening, in the 
black and dark night, they will go as oxen to the 
slaughter, and as fools to the correction of the stocks, 
till a dart strike through their own liver. — what can 
the poor helpless mother do, perhaps heartbroken and 
sick, and struggling, and vainly trying, it may be, to 
prevent the daughters also from following the revolt of 
the sons ? — what can she do in her helplessness, in her 
widowhood, under the hard conditions of her life? — 
what can she do in that most pathetic of all lots, but 
uplift to heaven her appealing hands and tear-dimmed 

eyes, and — 

" . . . fall with all her load of cares 
Upon the world's great altar stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God " ? 

Oh, if of those who read these pages there should be 
but one young man whose conscience shall here start 
up before him with menacing finger and outstretched 
hand, and say to him in that still, small voice w i >4 
louder than the thunders of Sinai, " Thou art the man i } 



i4 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

let him for very shame amend his ways ! For meta- 
phorically as it may be expressed by Eastern imagina- 
tion, there is yet a stern truth in the saying, — so 
heinous in God's sight is the sin of ingratitude and 
unfilial disloyalty to parents, — " The eye that mocketh 
at his father or his mother, and despise th to obey, the 
ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young 
eagles shall eat it." 

8. There is, then, ample, verge and room enough for 
noble life to every young man in his home. The foe to 
the accomplishment of these aims is the inveterate pride 
and self-assertiveness of our nature, the rank and flaunt- 
ing weed which is the Devil's favorite flower, because 
he well knows that its poisonous seeds are prolific and 
multiform. The longer I live the more it seems to me 
that humility is the most characteristic of all the Chris- 
tian graces. It is the root of that love which is the 
very bond of peace and of all virtues. When once a 
young man has learnt that life is service — that it is not 
he who turns the crank of the universe ! — that he, and 
every one of us, is in ourselves profoundly insignificant, 
and that in this — 

"Endless trouble of ants mid a million million of suns/' 

our sole importance springs, not from ourselves, but 
from conformity to the will of God, and union with our 
fellow-men; when once he has learnt that the true 
significance of life lies in service rendered to our breth- 
ren, as the outcome of love and obedience to God — 
when he has thoroughly learnt this, he cannot easily 
blind himself with clay. 

The warning which might be addressed to hundreds 
of young men is, " Ye think too much of yourselves, ye 






THE YOUNG MAN IN THE HOME. 15 

sons of Levi." And this is what gives such value to 
the advice of Henry Ward Beecher : " Let me say o 
every one that is beginning life — Do not begin wi "l 
exaggerated ideas of your own worth. Do not think 
that you, without battle, ought to be the victor, and 
walk from the beginning with those laurels about your 
head, which are to be twined there, if at all, only at the 
end of the campaign. Do not mistake your own tur- 
bulent pride, your own false-interpreting, lying vanity. 
Do not begin your life fancying that such a fine young 
fellow as you are, one so spruce, so handsome, so well 
dressed, so accomplished in various way, deserves a 
high place. Do not flatter yourself that life owes you 
more than it owes anybody else. It owes you, in com- 
mon with all others, just as much as, climbing, you can 
bring down. It owes you a chance to be something. 
It will give you that and nothing more." 

Many young men, like many young women, act like 
caged birds beating their wings to pieces against what 
they regard as their too narrow cage, and longing to 
wing their way into the boundless blue. Rightly re- 
garded, their cage may be to them a universe, which 
shall give large scope for their best and highest facul- 
ties. We may give them the excellent advice which 
Carlyle wrote to such a young lady in 1866 : " Were 
your duties never so small, I advise you set yourself 
with double and treble energy to do them, hour after 
I >ur, day after day, in spite of the devil's teeth ! What 
is our answer to all inward devils ? — < This I can do, O 
devil, and I do it, thou seest, in the name of God.' 
Were it but the more perfect regulation of your apart- 
ments, the sorting away of your clothes, the arranging 
of your papers, < whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do 



16 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

it with thy might ' and all thy worth and constancy. 
Much more if your duties are of evidently higher, wider 
scope; if you have brothers, sisters, a father, a mother, 
weigh earnestly what claim does lie upon you on behalf of 
each, and consider it as the one thing needful to pay them 
■more and more honestly and nobly what you owe. What 
matter how miserable one is if one can do that ? " 






THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 1? 



II. 
THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 

The commerce of England, which has spread with 
unprecedented rapidity and enormous increase of vol- 
ume during the present century, is one of the most 
visible signs of her wealth, and one of the main sources 
of her greatness and influence in the world. " The- 
white wake of the Atlantic vessels," said Emerson, "is 
the true avenue to the palace-front of this seafaring 
people. " The white sails of our merchant vessels are 
dotted over every sea, and there is hardly an islet-rock 
in the remote Pacific, or the desolate Antarctic Circle,, 
which has not seen the black smoke-flag of our steamers. 
We have turned the expansive vapor into our giant and 
all-powerful slave. We have seized the lightning by 
its wings of flame, and bidden it obediently to flash our 
humblest messages round the girdled globe, through 
tunnelled mountains and the abysses of stormy seas. 
God has made us the accumulators of the world's riches,, 
the carriers of its burdens, the manufacturers of its- 
most universal goods. Yet splendid and immense as is 
the domain of our world-empire, which makes us the 
possessors of one-sixth of the land surface of the globe, 
such prosperity and power have in them no elements of 
inherent permanence. "Assyria, Greece, Rome, Car- 
thage, — where are they ? " What Lord Beaconsfield 
said was not only eloquent, but true: that though we 
were greater than Venice or than Tyre, yet if we were- 



18 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

not faithful to our high mission as a nation, our glory 
might fade like the Tyrian dyes, and crumble like the 
Venetian palaces. 

It is a necessary consequence of our commercial great- 
ness that vast multitudes of our young men earn their 
living in business, and that a large part of this " busi- 
ness " is directly or indirectly commercial. What the 
young men now are in their business character and 
relations, that will the future of England be. 

In the old warrior commonwealths of Greece, fine 
muscular development, perfect physical beauty, heroic 
and self-sacrificing courage in the battlefield, were held 
to be of the supremest importance. They would have 
hailed the spirit of the verse of our modern poet : — 

"Vain mightiest fleets of iron framed, 
Vain those all-conquering guns, 
Unless proud England keep untamed 
The true heart of her sons." 

Nothing can better illustrate the consummate impor- 
tance which they attached to their young men, than the 
old Doric annual procession, in which the male popula- 
tion walked in three divisions : first, those who were 
past the zenith of their life; then those who were in 
the full flush of youth; lastly, the boys. Each, as 
they marched along, sang an iambic line. The elders 
sang : — 

" In former days we lived as stalwart youths.' ' 

The young men sang : — 

" Strong youths we are; and try us if thou wilt." 

Then the boys, with all the confidence of boyish auda- 
city, sang : — 

11 Ay, and we shall be! better far than both." 



THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 19 

The Greeks thus showed that to them the best mean- 
ing and value of life was crowded into those flushed 
and fleeting years, when " youth danceth like a bubble, 
nimble and gay, and shineth like the lustre of a rain- 
bow, which hath no substance, but of which the very 
image and colors are fantastical." 

Now, physical health and vigor will never cease to be 
of capital importance for the youth of any nation which 
would not " lose the wrestling thews which throw the 
world." If we ever sink into a nationally puny phy- 
sique, it is probable that we may become at the same 
time slight-natured and miserable. But of this, in the 
middle and upper classes, there is no danger. At any 
school in the kingdom we may see " our young barba- 
rians all at play," and may agree with Wellington, when 
looking at the playing-fields of Eton, he exclaimed, 
" It was there that Waterloo was won ! " Cricket, foot- 
ball, tennis, golf, bicycling, rowing, athletic sports, 
gymnastic contests, have rendered a real service to 
the health and strength of all the youth of the English 
people, even in our great overcrowded cities, and will 
continue to do so, unless they get tainted with the dry- 
rot of betting. There is more danger of athletics being 
made too prominent than of their falling into neglect. 
Certainly we would advise every youth to promote 
sanity of mind by health of body, and to remember that 
"you cannot rumple the jerkin without rumpling the 
jerkin's lining." We will assume, then, that the young 
man begins his business career with a strong and healthy 
frame, and we would advise him, even on moral grounds, 
to cultivate strength and health to the best of his 
power, as a means of furthering the usefulness as well 
as the happiness of his life. 



20 THE PATHS OF DUTY, 

But many other things are of supreme importance; 
and it is by moral qualities that the young man who 
aims at a high ideal in business must make his mark. 

1. For instance, it is almost superfluous to dwell on 
the necessity for inflexible honesty and integrity. It is, 
I suppose, sometimes possible for an individual to make 
a sudden fortune by fraud and wrong ; and it seems to 
be possible to make a fortune by an unblushing and 
blatant puffing, which is a vulgar and greedy element 
in modern life. But such means of enrichment are of 
their very nature extremely fugitive, and no nation's 
commerce could subsist by them uninjured for a single 
decade. The foundation of English commerce, at any 
rate till comparatively recent times, was its thorough- 
ness and soundness. All our customers throughout the 
world could rely on English goods. The}^ were what 
they pretended to be. There were no shams or shoddy 
in them. Whether this continues to be the case so uni- 
versally as of old I do not know; but certain it is that 
every young man's influence should be used to further 
rigid integrity. George Eliot, in " Middlemarch," was 
drawing a picture from the life when she described the 
disastrous collapse of Mr. Vincy's prosperity so soon as 
he began to use the cheap dyes recommended by his 
sham-religious brother-in-law, which were soon found to 
rot the silks for which he had once been famous. 

Those who have examined English commerce, and pro- 
fess to know its secrets, do not hesitate to declare that 
it involves a large amount of adulteration; and no 
less a writer than Mr. Herbert Spencer, in a celebrated 
paper on English trade, pointed to the existence of 
many methods and practices to which, if they really 
exist, no other name than that of chicanery and dishon- 



THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 21 

esty can be applied. That the young man in business 
may chance to be brought into contact with concerns 
conducted in a manner which will not stand the test 
— that he m ay find himself in positions in which it 
is assumed that he will not shrink from telling half- 
truths which are nearly akin to falsehood — that he 
may find himself initiated into certain secrets of the 
prison-house, unknown to the general public, which, to 
a sensitive conscience, seem tainted with imposture — 
is certain. I have not unfrequently received letters 
from young men who have found themselves placed in 
circumstances which caused them a constant struggle 
with the reproofs of a troubled conscience ; and fr< m 
others who, unable to sell their souls either for a mess 
of pottage or for a livelihood, have thrown up their 
situations, and faced the terrible difficulties of finding 
fresh employment rather than do what no sophistry 
could persuade them to regard as fair or even excus- 
able. It seems hard to advise a young man so circum- 
stanced to take the manly and courageous course, — to 
do the right, and at all costs to shame the Devil. One 
who has never been called upon to make so serious a 
sacrifice may almost shrink from the cheap and easy 
task of telling another that he ought to make it. Yet, 
if God be God, if the super-eminent beatitude of right- 
doing have all the certainty of a law, there ought to 
be no possible hesitation about the matter. To face 
even the abandonment of a situation, on grounds of 
scrupulous honesty, may seem, in some cases, a terrible 
ifice to make ; but " what shall it profit a man if he 
i the whole world, and lose his own soul ? " 
2. Next I would mention diligence and a certain disin 
f crested devotion to his employers' service as an essential 



22 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

for the highest success of the young man in business. 
A very rich man, who died with a title, once said to me, 
"Because I have been successful in life many young 
men come to me and ask me to give them a start. But 
they all want to begin more or less where and how I 
end, not where and how I began. My own history was 
this: I was the son of poor parents; the only educa- 
tion I ever got was at a free school, which I left at the 
a^e of fourteen. I was then put into an office. I did 
my very best there ; but, as I was determined to get on, 
I looked out for the most eminent man in my prof< s- 
sion, went to him, and asked him to let me work for 
him gratuitously when my business hours were over, 
simply that I might thoroughly understand the condi- 
tions of the business to which I had been apprenticed. 
He allowed me to come and work in the evening in his 
o ice, with no salary. I worked hard. By the end of 
the year I had learnt what I wished, but I had also 
made myself indispensable ; and the great man pressed 
me to enter his service with a good and increasing 
salary. That was the foundation of my present for- 
tune." " Yes," he said, "there is a check for a hundred 
pounds for your church. Don't thank me ! I really 
shall not miss it in the slightest degree at the end of 
the year. It makes no difference to me." 

His remarks were only an illustration of the proverb 
that the crowd is all at the bottom. " There's plenty of 
room at the top." 

3. " The conduct of this youth was mainly " wisch m 
for a man's self;" but while it is the surest rule for 
success that a youth should make himself indispensable, 
he may be sure that, in nine cases out of ten, in pro- 
moting the interests of his employer he is promoting 



THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 23 

his own. In the world of clerkdom, which is a very 

crowded world, our young Englishmen often murmur 
that, in many great regions of commerce, they are be- 
ing ousted by German clerks. But why is this ? The 
best things go to those who are best prepared for them. 
Another very wealthy man of high station, and a mem- 
ber of Parliament, told me that if he advertised for a 
clerk who knew enough of modern languages to conduct 
a wide business correspondence, he could over and over 
again find German youths. They had come to England 
and served for nothing in order to learn English, and, 
while they were content with modest salaries, could 
often speak and write three or four languages, whereas 
the English candidates raiely knew anything but Eng- 
lish. Naturally, he was obliged to engage those whose 
knowledge made them most serviceable. 

4. He also mentioned a remarkable trait of d ff *rence 
between his German and his English clerks. When six 
o'clock came, and the business hours were over, every 
English clerk would jump up from his seat the moment 
the clock struck, shut his books with a bang, hurry 
them into his desk, and be off in a moment to his gym- 
nasium and his bicycle. The German clerks would, in 
the interests of their employer and his business, quietly 
wait till they had finished the particular matter on 
which they were occupied. All our sympathies may 
be with the English lads, but the others would be more 
likely to get promoted, and to earn higher salaries. 

5. The rise of this gentleman himself from the hum- 
blest of poor and humbte homes to be a county member 
and the head of a great industry, was due entirely to 
energetic promptness. A cargo had been consigned to a 
dubious foreign company. There might yet be time to 



24 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

prevent its being handed over, if some one would take 
the journey of five or six hundred miles. The em- 
ployers summoned their confidential clerks, and asked 
them whether they would undertake this difficult mat- 
ter, and when they would start. Some of them said 
they would try, and would be ready to start the next 
day. This young man said, " I am ready now. I will 
starts at once." The firm at once intrusted the task 
to him. He started that evening; travelled night and 
day, without stopping to sleep or even to change his 
clothes; arrived just in time ; prevented the unpacking 
of the cargo, and saved his employers thousands of 
pounds. So great was the service which he had ren- 
dered, that, on his retur^ he was promoted to the po- 
sition of a junior partner. He had become the chief 
acting partner before h% attained to middle life, and 
is now a man of rank and importance. " Seest thou 
the man diligent in his business ? he shall stand before 
kings, he shall not stand before mean men." 

6. But the young man in business, if he is living a 
much more ideal life than that which keeps a too exclu- 
sive eye on the main chance ; if, in the demands of busi- 
ness, he does not forget the loftier and more eternal 
claims of a noble, human life, — must cultivate also a 
certain courage and independence of manly rectitude. 
Whatever may be his business, he will be thrown among 
others of his own age ; and it is one of his highest 
duties, not only to abstain from setting a bad and 'dan- 
gerous example, but also to escape the average, and to 
maintain a high standard before all men. And this is 
where the fear of man, the feebleness which is afraid to 
say " No," makes so many young men fail. When Ben- 
iamin Franklin was a youth in a printing-office, the 



THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 25 

other lads went out to bring in for lunch their foaming 
tankards of beer or porter. Franklin was then a total 
abstainer, from conviction, which was very rare in those 
days. His comrades laughed at him, and jeered him to 
their hearts' content, as a milksop and a fool ; but he 
held his own with unwavering good-humor. All those 
other printers' lads died in humble obscurity, but Frank- 
lin rose to greatness and immortality. 

"Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis." 

In the courageous steadfastness of his boyish charac- 
ter, we see one of the secrets of his future eminence. 

7. The quality is needed wherever men, and, above 
all, wherever young men, are gathered together. It is 
needed in the army, both among officers and privates. 
Cromwell's Ironsides went to battle each with a Bible 
in his knapsack, and were sneered at as snuffling and 
hypocritical " saints," — strange that the word descrip- 
t've of the grandest of human characters should be 
regarded by the coarsely vulgar as the bitterest of 
sn pfs ! — but they made the Cavalier chivalry skip. 
Nels );i's " Methodists " were the most trusted of his 
c -ws. Havelock's " Saints " [saved India. Once in 
Burmah, when nearly every other soldier was drunk, 
and the enemy threatened a most dangerous surprise, 
the general was in great anxiety and alarm. But one of 
his])fficers said to him, " Send for Havelock's ( Saints ; ' 
his men are never drunk, and Havelock is always 
ready." But undoubtedly such faithfulness of high 
principle costs something, especially at first. A youth 
in my parish enlisted. He was a total abstainer, and a 
splendid young fellow. He rapidly rose 1o be a ser- 
geant. The soldiers who had laughed at his teetotalism 



26 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

determined to play him a trick. It was a cavalry regi- 
ment, and they had to ride some distance, taking their 
rations with them. They took his flask, which he had 
filled with water, and filled it with brandy. He knew 
nothing of it, and when they halted for the midday 
meal, they watched him. Taking his flask, he found it 
full of brandy, and immediately, while every eye was 
fixed upon him, he turned the flask upside down, and 
poured all the brandy on the grass. 

A young officer in India found himself serving among 
very godless comrades, amid the fierce passions which 
were kindled during the suppression of the Indian mu- 
tiny. He thought that we were acting mercilessly and 
unjustly, and he remonstrated. He was severely perse- 
cuted. "What am I to do ? " he asked of General 
Outram, the Bayard of India, when he felt deeply de~ 
pressed amid a storm of calumny. " Do you fear God 
or man ? " asked Outram. " If you fear God, do as you 
are doing, and bear the insults which are heaped upon 
you. If you fear man and the mess, let them hang 
their number of rebels every day." Did not General 
Gordon's almost magic influence arise from the all-per- 
vading sense, inspired by his mere presence, that here 
was a man who always was, and always would be, in- 
flexibly true to his highest convictions ? When he was 
in the Soudan he never hesitated to place outside his 
tent the white handkerchief, which meant, as all men 
knew, that he was at prayer, and that during the sacred 
hour when he was alone with God he must not be dis- 
turbed. The young man who is guided by such prin- 
ciples, and who has attained to such moral courage, is 
perfectly certain to succeed in the highest form of pos- 
sible success, whatever his lot on earth may be. 






THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 27 

8. And, after all, the young man in business is situ- 
ated, as regards companionship, very much like the boy 
in the public school, or the young man at the univer- 
sities. His good example will be of priceless value 
wherever it is exhibited. When Coleridge Patteson was 
a boy at Eton, he was captain of the boats, and he had 
the courage to declare that he would resign his cap- 
taincy, and take no part in the rowing, if coarse songs 
were sung at the annual supper. When a very great 
living statesman was at Eton, he used deliberately to 
turn his glass upside down, before all eyes, if an im- 
proper toast was proposed. "When Arthur Cumnock 
went to Harvard," writes Mr. R. H. Davis, "the fast 
set had marked him for its own. The manly thing, so 
the incoming freshmen were told, was to drink and 
gamble politely, and wire-pull for the societies, and cut 
recitations. In four years this idea of the manly thing 
has changed, because the young athlete threw all his 
influence on the side of temperance in all things, fair 
play, courtesy, and modesty.' 7 

9. But lastly, what a young man will be in business 
and in life depends upon what he is in his own soul. 
There can be no perfection of manhood, there can be no 
nobleness of life, without the grand old eternal virtues 
of temperance, soberness, and chastity. If a young man 
cannot say "No" when he is asked to join in sweep- 
stakes, or bet on this or that " event/*' it may soon be 
all up with him. There is one jail in England of which 
a wing is said to be almost entirely filled with felons 
who began their downward career by betting and gam- 
bling, in a way which they chose to regard as manly 
and interesting. Tens of thousands in all ranks have 
been led on the high road to ruin by this detestable 



28 THE PATHS OF DUTY. 

epidemic of spurious excitement. He who wishes to be 
a true man must begin to take the right course as a 
young man respecting all these matters. He must be 
sternly on his guard against seductive pleasures. " I 
have sat upon the shore, and waited for the gradual 
approach of the sea," wrote Lady M. Wortley Montague, 
" and have seen the dancing waves and white surf, and 
admired that He who measured it with His hand had 
given to it such life and motion ; and I have lingered 
till its gentle waters grew into billows, and had well- 
nigh swept me from my firmest footing. So have I seen 
a heedless youth gazing with a too cu 'ious spirit upon 
the sweet motions and gentle approaches of an inviting 
pleasure, till it has detained his eye and imprisoned his 
feet, and swelled upon his soul, and swept him into a 
swift destruction." If a youth has not character enough, 
or firmness enough, to resist the Devil amid those ser- 
pent-like insinuations or terrible tiger-leaps by which 
Satan is certain to assault the soul, he may give up all 
hope of doing well either in business or in life. He will 
have nothing to give back to God at last except the dust 
of a polluted body, and the shipwreck of a lost soul. 
" So unspeakably poor may a soul go back into the gray 
mists of nothingness. They may write < Here lies no 
one buried,' and then after that let it go as it may." 
Oh, that every young man, whether in business or not, 
would bear this in mind, — that for the drunkard, the 
cheat, the liar, the impure, the corrupter of others, there 
is, short of a deep repentance and a total change, no 
hope on earth. What is true of the body is true also 
of the soul. The laws of God are to the moral powers 
what the laws of nature, so called, are to the phvsical 
powers. " Obedience to the laws of nature preserves 



THE YOUNG MAN IN BUSINESS. 29 

the bloom and life of the body; obedience to the laws 
of God preserves the bloom of the soul. ' In all these 
things is the life of the Spirit.' Moral death, ever en- 
larging itself, is as inevitable upon a course of sin as 
speedy mortality upon a course of vice. When sin 
enters it brings forth abundantly after its kind, and death 
is not so much its arbitrary award as its inevitable 
procreation.' 



30 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHUBCH. 



III. 

THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 

The title of the third paper which the editor has 
asked me to write is a little vague. " The Young Man 
in the Home/' and "The Young Man in Business," is 
equally " The Young Man in the Church." Ninety-nine 
out of every hundred young men have been baptized 
into the church of Christ ; and even in the few acciden- 
tal cases where this holy rite has been neglected, they 
are, in a wider and more eternal sense, members of the 
church of Christ, because, by the privilege of their 
human birth, they are members of Christ, the children 
of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. Many 
evils arise from the many different connotations in 
which the word " church " is used. A little " orienta- 
tion " on the subject may not be amiss, if it serve to 
show that by the word " church " we mean nothing 
clerical or sacerdotal or ecclesiastical or artificial, but 
simply the universal flock of Christ, of which the Church 
of England and the various Nonconformist bodies are 
separate folds. Our Lord only used the word " church " 
twice in all the discourses recorded in the four Gospels.. 
The word only occurs in two texts of one evangelist 
(Matt. xvi. 18 ; xviii. 17) ; and in one of those two pas- 
sages the word is used in the very limited sense of a 
local body of believers (Matt, xviii. 17) : " If he refuse 
to hear them, tell it unto the church," where the margin 
rightly gives " the congregation ; " i.e., of the local syna- 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 31 

gogue. Only in the words to St. Peter, " On this rock 
will I build my church," does Christ nse the word in 
the common modern sense. His habitual phrase for 
"all believers " — to whom, when he had overcome the 
sharpness of death, he opened the kingdom of heaven — 
was not " the church," but " the kingdom of heaven," or 
" the kingdom of God." By "the church," in its general 
sense, I never can mean this or that Christian body, and 
least of all any Christian body like the Church of Rome, 
which, with arrogant anathemas and exorbitant usurpa- 
tion, supported for centuries by ambition, forgeries, and 
frauds, claims an indefeasible right to regard its special 
corruptions as infallible, and to lord it over God's herit- 
age, either with threats and excommunications, or with 
the thumbscrew and the stake. I never can mean any- 
thing but " all who call upon the name of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours ; " all Christians, 
wheresoever they may be throughout the world ; " the 
mystical body of Christ, which is the blessed company 
of all faithful people." I am not writing immediately 
to the unholy and the unrighteous, the godless and 
profane, to liars and perjured persons ; I am not 
ostensibly addressing those who, having flung the re- 
straints of religion, and therewith of all morality, to 
the winds, are profane persons, like Esau, who for one 
morsel of food sold his birthright ; I am not writing 
to those who have deliberately plunged into the miser- 
able and meaningless excitement of betters and gamblers, 
who have drowned themselves in the deadening brutali- 
zation of drink, who are deliberately empoisoning the 
fountains of their own being, defiling the flesh, and 
speaking evil of dignities. But I am speakiug to all 
young men who have set before them any semblance or 



32 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 

vestige of a high and pure ideal ; to all who, what- 
ever may be the faults and baekslidings which, through 
the frailty of our mortal nature, prevent them from 
always standing upright, nevertheless desire to be, and 
in some measure continue to be, the sheep in Christ's- 
flock, the scholars in his school, the soldiers in his 
army, the honest laborers in his vineyard, the faithful 
servants in his house. 

Let no reader think that the duties of " the young 
man in the church " are lost in the vastness of the 
region of work. The sphere of our duties to the church 
of God and the brotherhood of nian widens round us in 
concentric circles, like those which we cause when we 
throw a stone into a lake, and the blue rings of ripple 
spread round the one point in its broken surface, and da 
not cease till they die away iipon the shore. Our duties 
begin with our own persons — all that we owe to our 
mortal bodies and to our immortal souls. They widen 
first to the circle of our immediate home, and of our 
entire family ; and thence they spread outwards to our 
neighborhood, our parish, our town, our county, our coun- 
try, our race, the whole race of man. " Every hammer- 
stroke on the anvil of duty forges something that shall 
outlast eternity." Little duties are great duties because 
they are duties. In the Arabian legend the Archangel 
Gabriel, sent by Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, 
at once to prevent Solomon the Magnificent from falling 
into a sin, and to help home a little weary, overbur- 
dened yellow ant, which otherwise would have been 
drowned in a coming shower, regards either work as 
equally dignified, because both alike are done at the 
behest of God. Let no young man think that any ser- 
vice which he can render is only small and insignificant, 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 33 

and therefore that it is hardly worth doing. "First do 
the little things well," says the Persian proverb, " and 
soon the great things will come begging you to do 
them." This is what George Herbert meant to teach 
when he wrote : — 

"A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as to Thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine; " 

and it was what Robert Browning meant in Pippa's 

song : — 

"All service ranks the same with God — 
With God, whose puppets, best or worst, 
Are we — there is no last or first." 

This, too, is the meaning of Christ's promise that 
even a cup of cold water given in his name to the least 
of his little ones shall not lose its reward ; and that he 
who would be first among us must be last of all, and 
servant of all. 

1. I have no hesitation in saying that the key-note to 
the work of " the young man in the church " will be 
struck by the way in which he uses his Sunday. If he 
regards it as a sacred day, holy to the Lord, honorable, 
beloved, if he treats its meditations, its worship, its 
communion with God, as a fountain in which he may 
constantly wash off " the contagion of the world's slow 
stain," he is utilizing, for his present and eternal good, 
one of the simplest yet most precious means of grace. 
If he makes it a duty and a rule to draw a distinction 
between Sunday and other days ; not to forsake the 
assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some 
is, but openly to profess himself a Christian by attend- 
ing the public worship of Christians ; to keep steadily 



34 THE YOUNG MAN Us THE CHURCH. 

in mind the lessons which he learnt at his confirmation, 
or at his admission into church communion ; — not to 
turn his back upon the Supper of the Lord ; then 
these acts of habitual faithfulness, which will soon be 
transmuted from self-denials into sources of joy, — 
added to his own daily prayers, morning and evening, 
" at the altar of his own bedside," — will do much, very 
much, to lead him in the way everlasting. They will 
keep his feet now and ever in the paths of wisdom, 
whose ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths 
are peace. But if, as so many do, he lets the voice of 
Christian duty as to these things sink first to a faint 
whisper, and then into indignant silence ; if he lets 
laziness and self-indulgence persuade him to eat the 
fruit of his own devices ; if he pleads that he works 
hard in the week, and has a right to claim Sunday " for 
himself ; " that sermons are a weariness to the flesh, 
and services a bore — then the giving up of this open 
participation in immemorial religious privileges will, 
times without number, be the first step in a downward 
career. The young man who neglects the means of 
grace will assuredly not grow in grace. I have seen 
this again and again. I have read of a young man who, 
remarking that he " preferred finding sermons in stones 
to hearing sticks preach," used to be found on Sunday 
lying under a tr ^e reading " Don Juan." The youth who 
abandons the requirements of his religion too often — 
and sooner rather than later — begins to sit loose to the 
inexorable laws of morality. A sure indication that a 
youth is in peril of falling into the clutches of the 
world, the flesh, and the devil, is when, with slight 
and contemptible excuses, which do not deceive his bet- 
ter self, he begins to speak his own words, and seek 



THE YOUNG MAN IN TTIE CHUllCU. 35 

his own pleasure on the Lord's Day. If godless com- 
rades say to him with a sneer : — 

11 What, always dreaming over heavenly things, 
Like angel-heads in stone with pigeon wings ? 
Mine be the friend less earnest in his prayers, 
Who takes less interest in his soul's affairs; ,T — 

the only answer is : — 

"Well spoken, advocate of sin and shame, 
Known by thy bleating, Ignorance thy name! " 

I am no rigid precisian, no hard, stern, uncompromising 
Puritan, in my views of the way in which Sunday 
should be hallowed ; I would have it always a glad and 
a natural day, as well as a sacred day. But this I say : 
Show me two young men, of whom one is regularly seen 
in his place in church on Sunday, and tries to make of 
tj*e service a real time of prayer and praise; and the 
other spends the whole day in reading newspapers, in 
riding immense distances on his bicycle, refreshing him- 
self at public-houses by the way, and not interrupting 
by one serious word the frivolities of idlest, if not even 
of unhallowed, talk, poured forth " in one weak, wasting, 
^everlasting flood " — then I know which of the two is 
the safer, and which of the two will go to rest at night 
the more happy, and at peace with God, and with his 
own soul. 

2. I think that every young man who has any sense 
of reverence — of the fear and faith of God, and love to 
the Lord Jesus Christ — should dennitel} r identify him- 
self with one church, and with the beneficent work of 
that church. It is best if he can attach himself to the 
church of his own parish; but if, for any reason, in 



36 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHUROH 

that church he finds that, so far as he is concerned, the 
clergy do not reach him, but — 

"When they list their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scranned pipes of wretched straw — 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;" — 

then let him, without scruple, join another church. But 
do not let him be too much in a hurry to judge and re- 
ject preachers, or to pass empty, flippant, and conceited 
criticisms upon them. 

"The worst speak something good: if aU want sense, 
God takes the text, and preaches patience." 

3. But next every young man should regard it as a 
duty to take some distinct part, however small, in some 
one definite branch of church activity. He can sing in 
a choir ; or help as a sidesman in seating the congrega- 
tion and collecting the offertory ; or take a class in the 
Sunday-school ; or go out with the lads to their cricket 
or football on Saturdays ; or manage a penny bank ; or 
be secretary of an institute ; or teach all the lads in the 
school to swim ; or be. officer in a boys' brigade ; or help 
to organize pleasant evenings for the people ; or share 
in the training of a gymnasium ; or undertake secreta- 
rial work ; or visit in a slum ; or twenty other things, 
which will help to identify him with the beneficent ser- 
vice of others, and deepen in his mind the conviction 
that the service of the poor, the young, and the ignorant 
is much too sacred a thing to be delegated to the clergy 
only. We cannot do by proxy our duty to our neigh- 
bor. It is the common work of the whole church of 
God ; and young men, as members of the church, have 
their share in the general responsibility. And these two 
things I can tell them, — one, that they will soon find, in 




THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH, 37 

any real and self-denying work thus undertaken, not a 
disagreeable burden, but a source of personal advantage, 
and much happy experience ; the other, that this form of 
altruism, whatever it may be, must not be regarded as a 
mere insignificant adjunct of life, but as the one thing 
which gives to a young man's life its best dignity and 
its most essential importance. I have known not a few 
youths who have owed their entire position and rise in 
life to that faithfulness which led them to take part 
in the work of the church of God. 

4. Let us, as in the former cases, look at one or two 
contrasts. 

i. Here is the career of one of the world's millions 
of prodigals, ending, as all such careers must do, in 
collapse, and, unless repentance comes in time, in final 
catastrophe. It is one of the most marvellous of the 
mysteries of iniquity that, in the lives of crowds of 
young men, all the accumulated experience of the past 
history of the world goes for so very little. This is the 
lesson taught in that "unwritten saying," attributed to 
Christ by Mohammedan tradition : — 

" Jesus once said, ' The world is like a deceitful 
woman, who, when asked how many husbands she had 
had, answered, "so many that she could not count them. 
I murdered and got rid of them." It is strange,' said 
Jesus, ' that the rest had so little wisdom that, in spite 
>f your cruel treatment of others, they took no warning, 
and still burned with love for you.' " 

The youth of whom I speak — his name was well 
\nown, and he is dead, but I will not mention it, for 

allude to him not to condemn him, but to warn others 
- was one of high genius and brilliant promise. He 

as the only son of a clergyman ; gifted far beyond 



38 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH, 

most youths with a handsome person and a fine intel- 
lect. While yet young he fell — no matter how, no 
matter where — into the snares of the sorceress, with 
the result which no transgressor can ever escape. Even 
the Greeks knew that he who listened to the song of the 
sirens will be dashed in hopeless shipwreck upon the 
bone-strewn isles ; that the magic cup of Circe — her 
"orient liquor in a crystal glass'' — was a cup which 

M The visage quite transforms of him who drinks, 
And the inglorious likeness of a beast 
Fixes instead, unmoulding reason's mintage 
Charactered in the face." 

One who knew best this youth of whom I speak, and 
tried to love him even in his degradation, was forced 
thus to allude to him : — 

" I had once had the opportunity of contemplating near at 
hand an examine of the results produced by a course of interest- 
ing and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction 
was about this example. I saw it bare and real, and it was very 
loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean sub- 
terfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body de- 
praved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I 
had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this 
spectacle : those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple 
recollection acted? as a most wholesome antidote to temptation. 
They had inscribed on my reason the conviction that unlawful 
pleasure . . . is delusive and envenomed pleasure — its hollow- 
ness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures after- 
wards, its effects deprave forever." 

This youth died, — died prematurely, died miserably, 
and his sister wrote : — 

"We have buried our dead out of sight. ."". . It is not per- 
mitted us to grieve for him who is gone, as others grieve for 
those whom they love. The removal of our only brother must 



THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 39 

be regarded rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. 
He was his father's and his sisters' pride in boyhood, . . . but it 
has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent ; to hope, expect, 
await his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope 
deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled; to experience despair at 
last; and now to behold the sudden, early, obscure close of what 
might have been a noble career — the wreck of talent, the ruin 
of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have 
been a burning and shining light. Nothing remains of him but 
a memory of errors and sufferings. There is such a bitterness of 
pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of 
his whole existence, as I cannot describe. 1 seemed to receive 
an impressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity; of the 
inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness unaided by 
religion and principle." 

ii. With such a life — so deplorably wasted on the 
bitter longing for, and the yet bitterer fruition of, the 
passions of dishonor — the life, alas ! of many thou- 
sands, and usually begun in boyhood or youth — com- 
pare the work which young men of a nobler stamp and 
of purer hearts have achieved in the church of God. 

A young man had gained a prize for a Latin essay at 
Cambridge in 1784. The subject of the essay was u Is 
Involuntary Servitude Justifiable ? " He recited the 
essay in June, and then mounted his horse to ride to 
his home in London. On his way he thought over the 
shocking facts of the slave-trade, and grew so much 
agitated that he dismounted, and, sitting down to think, 
came to the conclusion, " If this be so, slavery must be 
put down." He determined to devote himself to the 
cause of freeing England from the disgrace of " using 
the arm of freedom to rivet the fetters of the slave." 
For twenty-two years he labored amid many difficulties 
and dangers. Twenty-two years afterwards, and in no 
small measure through him, the slave-trade was abol- 



40 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 

ished in 1807 by Act of Parliament. Twenty-six years 
after that, in 1833, the existing slaves were emanci- 
pated. An obelisk now stands on the spot which wit- 
nessed the self-consecration of his life. The name of 
that youth was Thomas Clarkson, and the result of 
his work in the church was the protection and happi- 
ness of hundreds of thousands of the most oppressed 
and miserable of mankind. 

A little more than a century ago there was a poor 
young Baptist cobbler at Kettering in Northampton- 
shire. He was by no means a good cobbler, and a gen- 
tleman who wanted to employ him sometimes gave him 
two pairs of boots to make, on the off chance of getting 
a right and left which should be reasonably wearable. 
He eked out his very slender earnings by teaching in 
the village school. This youth was oppressed by the 
thought that while Christianity was only represented by 
a few twinkling points of light in vast regions of the 
globe, there were areas of thousands of square miles 
over which darkness covered the lands, and gross dark- 
ness the peoples. He used to weep as he showed to his 
poor village scholars a map of which so vast an extent 
represented only the blackness of heathendom. He 
became a minister in the little Baptist community, and 
urged on his brethren the burning conviction of our 
duty to the heathen world which pervaded his own soul. 
"Young man," said the senior minister, "sit down. If 
God wants to convert the world, He will do so without 
your help." But the youth persevered. He preached 
on " Enlarge the stakes of thy tent," and the offertory 
amounted to £13 2s. 6d. The world laughed consum- 
edly through all its organs and societies at the thirteen 
pounds two and sixpence, and the host of " consecrated 






THE YOUNG MAN IN THE C II U LICIT. 41 

cobblers " who were to convert the heathen millions. 
But that youth was named William Carey, and ere he 
died he had translated the Bible into some of the chief 
vernacular Bibles of India, and given the first mighty 
impulse to those missions which, from the Himalayas to 
Cape Comorin, have undermined the monstrous idola- 
tries of Hindostan. 

Take but one instance more. Some seventy years 
ago a Harrow boy of noble birth was standing not far 
from the school gates, when he saw with indignation 
the horrible levity with which some drunken men were 
conducting a pauper funeral : — 

" Rattle his bones over the stones, 
He's only a pauper whom nobody owns!" 

Then and there that generous boy dedicated himself to 
defend through life the cause of the oppressed, to pity 
the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners, and to see that 
those in need and necessity had their rights. To this 
high service he felt himself to be anointed as by the 
hands of invisible consecration, and nobly was his vow 
fulfilled. He saved the little chimneysweeps from the 
brutalities to which they were subjected. He mitigated 
or cancelled the horrors of factories and mines. He 
founded ragged schools. He helped the poor coster- 
mongers. He went about like the knights of old redress- 
ing human wrongs. To few men has it been given to 
achieve more for the amelioration of the human race. 
He passed, as all the best and bravest men pass, through 
hurricanes of calumny, and felt the heartsickness of 
hope deferred amid painful isolation. Never was there 
a more remarkable and beautiful sight than that of his 
funeral in Westminster Abbey. "For departed kings 



42 THE YOUNG MAN IN THE CHURCH. 

there are appointed honors, and the wealthy have their 
gorgeous obsequies. It was his nobler lot to clothe 
a nation in spontaneous mourning, and to sink into the 
grave amid the benedictions of the poor/' His name 
was Antony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. His 
statue stands by the western gate of the great Abbey in 
marble not whiter than his life, and the two mighty 
monosyllables carved upon it : — 

Love Serve 

are the best epitome of the best work of " the young 
man in the church." 



YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 43 



IV. 
YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

The world in general laughed heartily at Mr. Punch's 
" Advice to those who are about to marry," which, on 
turning the page, was found to consist of the one word, 
" Don't." As a universal rule the advice would be very 
bad advice. The causes which led to the neglect and 
avoidance of marriage in the decadence alike of Greece 
and Rome, were the vilest and most degrading causes 
possible. They were deeply seated vice and degrading 
selfishness. In Greece they culminated rapidly in the 
collapse of all nobleness and power — " the fading of 
all glory into darkness, and of all strength into dust." 
The Greek — the hero of Marathon and Salamis, the 
patriot of Thermopylae, who deemed it sufficient epi- 
taph : — 

" Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, 
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie," — 

soon dwindled by luxury and sensualism into the Grce- 
culus esuviens of which Juvenal drew so contemptuous 
and indignant a picture. The Eoman, whose iron arms 
and dauntless courage had subdued the world, sank into 
the corrupt and effeminate dandy who cared only for his 
own degraded comfort, until Rome " saw her glories star 
by star expire," and she : — 

"... whom mightiest kingdoms curtsied to, 
Like a forlorn and desperate castaway, 
Did shameful execution on herself." 



44 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

Even in the days of Augustus, and increasingly under 
the later emperors, the state felt it necessary to inter- 
fere with vicious self-indulgence, in the instinct of na- 
tional self-preservation. Laws were passed conferring 
distinctions and privileges on those who had three chil- 
dren born in honorable wedlock, and a selfish celibacy 
was branded with reprobation. Long before those days, 
in the dramas of Plautus and Terence, the conclusion 
always turns on the young man's marriage ; and the 
fathers never feel themselves secure until that event 
has been happily arranged. The encouragement of mar- 
riage, and its felt sacredness, have been the c,hief ele- 
ment in the vitality of the Jews : and the books, both 
sacred and secular, of that most religious of the ancient 
nations,' abound in eulogies upon the blessedness of mar- 
riage, until in the days of the Talmudists it became a 
fixed disgrace for a Jew not to have married by the age 
of twenty-one. 

"A Jew who has no wife," says the Talmud, "is not 
a man, for it is said, /Male and female created He: 
them.'" And again: "From the age of twenty, if a 
man lives in celibacy, he lives in constant transgression. 
Up to that age, the Holy One (blessed be He!) waits 
for him to enter into the state of matrimony, and curses 
his bones if he does not marry then." I do not suppose 
that Lord Tennyson had ever read this passage from 
the " Mishnah," yet he says much the same : — 

111 Alone' I said, 'from earlier than I know, 

Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world, 

I loved the woman ; he that doth not lives 

A drowning life, besotted in sweet self, 

Or pines in sad experience worse than death, 

Or keeps his winged affections dipt with crime.' " 

It is not, however, my object to dwell on the many 



YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 45 

dangers and disadvantages of a purel} seifish or vicious 
celibacy. I am addressing those who mean, God will- 
ing, to enter on the married state, and who, even now, 
find in a true and pure love an antidote against tempta- 
tion, and a bond of moral faithfulness to their future 
wives — a bond founded not only upon chivalry, but 
upon the loftiest religious motives. 

Are there, then, none who are about to marry, who, 
nevertheless, would do well to bear in mind the impe- 
rious monosyllabic dissuasion DonH? Yes, there are 
some, and it is important that on them this advice 
should be impressed. 

1. If, for instance, a young man knows that he has 
incapacitated himself by the retributive consequences 
of past transgressions from a pure and healthy mar- 
riage, then, if he have indeed repented of unlawful 
deeds, he is bound to remember that he has forfeited 
the right to a hallowed union, and that it would be, on 
his part, a consummate baseness to entail on an inno- 
cent wife, and on innocent children yet unborn, the 
fearful Nemesis which is to him the brand of God upon 
forbidden indulgences. If, again, though he have him- 
self been perfectly innocent, he knows that in his family 
there is the confirmed and hereditary taint of scrofula, 
of malformation, of idiocy, or of consumption, then he 
should feel that, by the voice of inevitable circum- 
stances, God calls to him for a great self-renunciation. 
Let him not moan that the call is too hard upon him. 
God never withholds his immense compensations from 
those who, for his sake, give up father or mother, or 
wife or children. In proportion to the greatness of the 
elf-sacrifice shall they receive the hundredfold reward. 
1 knew one who had thus voluntarily given up. He was 



46 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

a saint of God, and if ever there was a man to whose 
sad heart the sweet companionship of a loving woman 
would have brought a boundless consolation for life's 
many troubles, it was he. But his father and his uncle 
had died by their own hands, and there had been other 
warning calamities in his family. He feared that the 
taint of madness might, in due time, reveal itself in 
him also; though, for long years of manhood, nothing 
could have been more holy and useful than his life, and 
more sound than his intelligence. So he made his re- 
solve that he would never marry ; that it was better for 
society that his race should end with him. His surmise 
proved true. Had he married, the end might have been 
some terrible tragedy. He died, peaceful and happy, in 
an asylum which sheltered and secured him from the 
development of homicidal mania. 

2. There is another hindrance to the lawfulness of 
marriage which ought never to be overlooked : it is 
hopeless poverty, or entire uncertainty of any continu- 
ous means of earning a livelihood. To marry like brute 
beasts which have no understanding, as is sometimes 
done by mere boys and girls in the slums, within half a 
crown of destitution, or with no more secure promise 
of maintenance than a chance job of a week or two, 
is mere revolting selfishness and animal degradation. 
These are the marriages which blight society with the 
prolific birth of a feeble, stunted, half-starved, vicious, 
and semi-idiotic offspring, to be the curse of a future 
generation. If a man has no sufficient means to main- 
tain a wife and family, his marriage does but kick 
against the ordinance of his destiny. His selfishness 
will not only inevitably doom himself to grinding care 
and crushing anxiety, but he will drag down his wife 



YOUNG MAN AM) MARRIAGE. 47 

and children into the pitiless abyss of hunger and 
misery. Be he clergyman or layman, the man who has 
no sufficient means on which to marry commits a crime 
against society if he marries on the chance of something 
"turning up." To such persons nothing ever does 
"turn up." They are like the old lady who felt sure 
that it was going to rain, but said "that she would 
trust to Providence to send her an umbrella." 

3. But if in a man's own person or circumstances 
there be no such divinely appointed hindrance, he is 
none the less bound to be careful in his choice of the 
partner of his life. The young man who chooses his 
bride from a family in which there is much consump- 
tion, or other fatal heredity, prepares for himself here- 
after the misery of bereavement and the certainty of 
many blighted hopes. If a young man have any calm- 
ness of judgment, he will consider the extreme desira- 
bility that the mother of his children should be one 
whose health and strength and intelligence will leave 
them the lifelong legacy of a sound mind in a sound 
body. And here let no one say that these are cold- 
blooded calculations, which are swept away as with a 
flood by " falling in love." To fall in love wildly, in- 
considerately, imprudently, hastily, with no control of 
sense, reason, or conscience, is to follow a blind and im- 
petuous instinct, and to behave otherwise than duty re- 
quires in the most solemn event of life. The marriage 
of the maid who was engaged to a stranger when she 
went into the garden to cut a cabbage is scarcely likely 
to be a happy one. A young man may be suddenly taken 
by a pretty face, but if that be the sole qualification in 
nis future wife, he may find too soon that " favor is de- 
ceitful, and beauty vain; but a prudent wife is from the 
Lord." 



48 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

4. I should advise a young man to think twice before 
he marries an untidy girl. I have been a guest in 
houses where everything was revolting from this cause, 
and where one scarcely ventured to open a drawer in 
the guest-chamber for fear of what one might find An it. 
Certainly, in respect to a man's home, "cleanliness is 
next to godliness/' and untidiness means squalor and 
waste. Few old friends will care to visit a man who 
has a slatternly wife, and children whose faces in conse- 
quence are not kept sweet and clean. A young lady 
once asked her lover to direct a letter for her. He did 
it so hastily that the direction was blotted and illegible. 
She blushed as he handed it back to her, and from that 
moment her affection for him began visibly to cool. 
The engagement never came off ; and as he recounted 
the circumstance, he was magnanimous enough to ob- 
serve that " she had been more than half right." 

5. And most assuredly the young man who finally 
chooses his bride without having good reason to be sure 
that her temper is as a rule sweet and equable, is taking 
a rash step, and one which he may rue through many a 
bitter year. 

" Look you, the gray mare 
Is ill to live with, when her whinny shrills 
From tile to scullery, and her small good-man 
Shrinks in his arm-chair, while the fires of hell 
Mix with his hearth." 

This, at least, is the recorded experience of three thou- 
sand years. "It is better," says the wise king, "to 
dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a brawl- 
ing woman in a wide house ; " and " the contentions of 
a wife are a continuous dropping." Petruccio was pro- 
foundly wise in taming his Shrew before he became her 
victim. Nor is there any real necessity for making a 



YOUNG MAX AND MARRIAGE. 40 

wrong choice by mistake. A young man is supremely 
foolish if he marries a girl about whom he knows little 
or nothing. The face may be some index, but it may 
unconsciously lead to very mistaken conclusions. If, 
however, a young man has made many opportunities of 
being in the society of his intended bride before he 
takes the irrevocable step of binding himself to her in a 
bond which cannot be dissolved, then he must be more 
than usually obtuse if, by her bearing to her father and 
mother, to her brothers and sisters, to her companions, 
to the old and to the young, he is not Very well able to 
gauge her character. And if he sees that, though she 
may show herself in the best light to him individually, 
she reveals a strong] undercurrent of selfishness in her 
character, I should advise him to pause in time. I once 
knew an eminent person, who was in character a man of 
singular geniality and buoyancy of spirits, but who, for 
what reason I never could make out, married a hard, 
harsh, angular, unattractive wife. What the lady may 
have been to him I do not know, but certain it is that 
whereas before his marriage he had been surrounded by 
troops of friends, yet after his marriage hardly one of 
them, much as they continued to love and honor him, 
ever entered his house. His wife, whether from parsi- 
mony, or religion turned sour, or inherent " cussedness, ,? 
turned the cold shoulder on them, and if they called 
once they w r ere never encouraged to call again. A wife 
without sympathy may cost a man the loss of all his 
friends. 

6. If there be one Phylloxera vastatrix of wedded 
happiness more fatal in its ravages than another, if 
there be one intruder into this vineyard which, more 
surely than any other, will cause its root to be as rot- 



50 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

t3nness, and its blossom to go up as dust, it is intemper- 
ance. I recall many a harrowing example of this curse 
and corruption — this heavy blow and sad discourage- 
ment — in wedded lives, which it has been my fate to 
witness. No more certain, no more absolute collapse of 
happiness can be even conceived. I recall one, of whose 
wife persons soon began to ask how her strange de- 
meanor could be accounted for ; why she was so often 
heavy and stupid and odd in her behavior; why at 
others she showed a sort of spurious hilarity ? And 
the answer could not be long in coming : she was by 
position a lady, but she drank. I recall the young man, 
exceptionally prosperous in his position, with all life 
stretching before him in apparent brightness, married to 
the shallow, showy, arrogant, domineering woman, with 
her dress and her extravagance and her fashionableness 
of sham religion, and who, unable to control this domes- 
tic scourge, took to drinking his bottle of port wine 
every day at dinner. He sank lower and lower into 
debt, lost his clients, failed to pay the bills of his wine- 
merchant, went all downhill into shabbiness and dis- 
grace, and so ruined himself, and bequeathed ruin to his 
children after him. I recall the man, respectable and 
diligent, who came to me weeping, to say that, at all 
costs, he must leave his home ; at all costs he must turn 
his back on his country ; at all costs he must separate 
from his wife, for she was slowly dragging him down 
into the abyss, and had again and again brought him 
into misery and confusion by selling for drirk every 
stick of his furniture, and causing such scenes of vio- 
lence and shame that, if they continued, he knew not 
what tragedy might come of them. I recall another — 
a fine stalwart man — who came to ask my advice what 






YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 51 

he should do, since his wife, in his necessary absence al 
work, pawned for drink the very clothes and boots of his 
boys, so that it was impossible for them to go to school. 
To every young man, of the poorer and lower middle 
classes especially, I should say, " If you are a total ab- 
stainer, and if your future wife is a total abstainer, from 
intoxicating drink, there is, at any rate, one sunken reef 
which has caused many a horrible shipwreck, from the 
peril of which the ship of your life will be kept free. 
II. I have spoken of the choice of a bride, let me now 
speak of marriage itself. 

1. Even if the young man and his bride are free from 
egregious faults and dangerous tendencies, marriage may 
still become a failure and a miseiy if it leads to an au- 
tocratic tyranny either of wife or of husband ; or to the 
worse alternative of an incessant clash and conflict of 
opposing wills. "You must take two bears with you 
into your home, my dear," said a quaint old lady to her 
nephew, " if you want to be happy.*' — " Two bears ? ' 
he asked in astonishment. " Yes, 7 ' she said, " "bear and 
forbear." It was extremely wise advice. In marriage, 
where it is the true union of hearts, there still must be 
give and take ; and each must be glad, many a time, to 
prefer what in the abstract he would like less, because 
it is the cherished wish of one dearer to him than him- 
self. How well Milton puts it in the lines : — 

"She as a veil down to the slender waist 
Her unadorned golden tresses wore 
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved, 
As the vine waves her tendrils; which implied 
Subjection, but required with gentle sway, 
Anl by her yielded, by him best received, 
Yielded with coy submission, honest pride, 
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay." 



52 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

Y^es ! but the fundamental "subjection" must often be 
suffered to become a happy dominance by the voluntary 
tenderness which seeketh not its own, and is not easily 
provoked. 

2. Where there is found in well-assorted marriages 
this lowly wisdom of the self-sacrifice which love trans- 
mutes into delight, there marriage, which Christ himself 
" adorned and beautified with his presence, and first 
miracle which he wrought in Cana of Galilee," becomes 
indeed a flower rescued from the Lost Paradise. It has 
been so in all ages ; for it is an ordinance of God him- 
self, from the beginning, that "they twain shall be 
one flesh." We know the pictures of Holy Writ. In 
the Old Testament we read of the happy homes of 
Abraham, of Isaac, of Boaz, of Jesse, with his group 
of splendid sons. " Whoso fmdeth a wife, findeth a 
good thing," says Solomon. " Live joyfully," says the 
Preacher, " with the wife whom thou lovest all the days 
of thy vanity." " A good wife is a good portion," says 
the son of Sirae : " she shall be given into the bosom of 
them that fear the Lord." In the New Testament, per- 
haps a thousand years later, we read that, " marriage is 
honorable in all, and a bed undefiled." 

3. Here, again, is the beautiful picture drawn by a 
Christian writer, Tertullian, in the third century. " How 
happy," he says. k> is the marriage which Heaven ap- 
proves ! How shall I suffice to describe the felicity of 
that marriage which the church unites and the sacra- 
ment confirms, and the blessing seals; which angels 
make known, and the Father holds for valid ! How 
blest the wedding of two of the faithful of one hope, 
one discipline, one service! Both are brethren, both 
fellow-servants. Together thej pray; together they 



YOUNG MAN AN J) MARRIAGE. 58 

instruct, exhort, and uphold one another. They are 
alike in the church of God, in the feasts of God, in 
straits, in persecutions, in consolations. Neither avoids 
the other ; neither is stern to the other. Freely they 
visit the sick, they help the poor. Christ, seeing and 
hearing such things, rejoices. To them he sends his 
peace. Where the two are there is he, and there the 
Evil One is not." Truly such a marriage is "the queen 
of friendships " and " the nursery of heaven." 

And to show that this is no mere ideal picture of the 
past, here is the testimony of a modern novelist, which 
I quote because it is full of beauty and wise sugges- 
tiveness : — 

" He a gentleman ; she a wifely wife, a motherly 
mother, and a lady. This, then, is a happy couple. 
Their life is full of purpose and industry, yet lightened 
by gayety. There the divine institution, marriage, 
takes its natural colors, and it is at once pleasant and 
good to catch such glimpses of Heaven's designs, and 
sad to think how often the great boon accorded by God 
to man and woman must have been abused ere it could 
have sunk to be the standing joke and butt of farce 
writers and the theme of weekly punsters. 

" In this pair we see the wonders a male and a female 
may do for each other in the sweet bond of holy wed- 
lock. In that blessed, relation alone two interests are 
really one, and two hearts lie safe at anchor side by 
side. 

" * They are friends — for they iire man and wife ; 
They are lovers still — for # they are man and wife; 
They are one forever — for they are man and wife.' 

•This wife brightens the house from kitchen to garret 
for her husband; this husband \v< rics like a king for 



54 YOUNG MAN AND MARBIAGE. 

his wife. They share all troubles, and by sharing halve 
them. They share all pleasures, and by sharing double 
them. They climb the hill together now ; and when, by 
the inevitable law they begin to descend towards the 
dark valley, they will still go hand in hand, smiling so 
tenderly, and supporting each other with a care more 
lovely than when the arm was strong and the foot firm. 
What terrors has old age for this happy pair ? It can- 
not make them ugly ; for though the purple light of 
youth recedes, a new kind of tranquil beauty — the aloe 
blossom of many years of innocence — comes to, and sits 
like a dove upon the aged faces, where goodness, sym- 
pathy, and intelligence have harbored together and long, 
and where evil passions have flitted (for we are all 
human), but found no resting-place." l 

Such is a marriage begun in the high spirit of the 
prince who says to his bride : — 

' ; My wife, my life ! Oh, we will walk this world, 
Yoked in all exercise of noble end, 
And so through those dark gates across the wild 
Which no man knows." 

Certainly, then, w r e advise a young man to marry so it 
be a wise marriage, so it be a prudent marriage. Only let 
him enter upon this crisis of his life not "unadvisedly, 
lightly, and wantonly," but " discreetly, advisedly, so- 
berly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes 
for which matrimony was ordained." It was ordained 
both for the foundation of happy homes, and the con- 
tinuance of the life of men to other generations ; and 
also " for the society, help, and comfort that one ought 
to have of the other both in prosperity and adversity." 

1 C. Reade, "Christie Johnstone." 




YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 55 

Then will marriage become the best of moral safeguards ; 
the most urgent of generous inspirations, to work and 
effort; the most precious solace amid the burdens, cares. 
and anxieties of life. 

" My wife, my child," so sings the Chartisl poetj 
Ernest Jones : — 

" My wife, my child, come close to me; 
The world we know is a stormy sea : 
With your hands in mine, if your eyes but shine, 
I care not how wild the storms may be. 

For the fiercest wind that ever blew 

Is nothing to me if I shelter you; 

Xo warmth do I lack, for the howl at my back 

Sings down to my heart. "Man bold and true!" 

A pleasant sail, my child, my wife, 

O'er a pleasant sea to many is life: 

The wind blows warm, and they fear no storm. 

And wherever they go kind friends are rife. 

But. wife and child, the love, the love 

That lifteth us to the saints above. 

Could only have grown where storms have blown. 

The truth and strength of the heart to prove." 

Immensely different from the stormy life of Ernest 
Jones was the sunshine of fashionable society amid 
which Tom Moore lived ; but if the former found the 
peace at home which was not possible to him in the 
midst of impassioned controversies, the latter when he 
t)0 experienced that applause and popularity may turn 
to ashes, and that all which the world can give is thrice- 
doubled j?mptiness. found in his home also something 
better than the world could either give or take away. 
In the touching lines on his birthday, — the best and 
truest tlmt he ever wrote,!— when lie confesses that if 



56 YOUNG MAN AND MARRIAGE. 

he had it in his power to obliterate the past but little of 
it should stay, he adds that all should be erased : — 

"All but that freedom of the mind 

Which has been more than wealth to me; 
Those friendships, in my boyhood twined, 

And kept till now unchangingly; 
And one dear home — one saving ark, 

Where love's true light at last I've found. 
Shining within, when all was dark, 

And comfortless, and stormy round." 

To every young man, therefore, I would say again, 
that, if God gives him the grace of a pure ,ancl happy 
marriage, he gives him a very rose of Paradise. And 
when he has reverently plucked it, he will soon learn 
to say : — 

' ' Hail, wedded love ! mysterious law — true source 
Of human offspring, sole propriety 
In Paradise, of all things common else. 
By thee adulterous lust was driven from men, 
Among the bestial herds to range; by thee 
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and -pure 
Relations dear, and all the charities 
Of father, son, and brother first were known. 

Here Love his golden shafts employs; here lights 
His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings; 
Reigns here and revels. 



THE YOUNG MAX. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 57 



THE YOUNG MAX. MASTEK OF HIMSELF. 

Feeling the warmest and kindest interest in the 
welfare of young men, I have written, as I have been 
asked to do, on " The Young Man in the Home," " The 
Young Man in Business," "The Young Man in Married 
Life," and "The Young Man in the Church; " but one 
more paper is imperatively needed if the others are to 
have their due influence. It is, in fact, the necessary 
prelude to the others. It is on "The Young Man, Mas- 
ter of Himself." Unless he be this, the young man will 
not fulfil his highest ideal in any other sphere. His 
life, even if it be externally prosperous, cannot but be a 
failure ; yes, and the worst of failures. For the worst 
of failures for any human life is not to be poor, or insig- 
nificant, or outwardly unfortunate, but to be the slave 
of his lower nature. Many of the best and noblest of 
the human race — the prophets and the saints of God — 
have been hated, persecuted, outcast ; they have wan- 
dered about in sheepskins and goatskins, in dens and 
caves of the earth, being destitute, afflicted, tormented ; 
and many of them have been tortured not accepting 
deliverance. Nor has this been the case only with the 
heroes of faith. Not a few of the rarest human souls 
have had to bear all through life " the slings and arrows 
of outrageous fortune." Of our great poet Spenser, his 
admirer, Phineas Fletcher, wrote in his "Purple Is- 
land : " — 



58 THE YOUNG MAN. —MASTER OF HIMSEEF. 

"Yet all his hopes were crossed, his suits deny'd ; 
Discouraged, scorned, his writings vilified, 
Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died : " 

and we know how often the starry soul of Milton found 
itself — 

" Fallen on evil days and evil tongues, 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round. 
And solitude. " - 

What hope was there that a noble heart could find it- 
self at ease amid the barbarous dissonance of Bacchus 
and his revellers, in the bad days of the Stuart Restora- 
tion ? A man must have made very small progress in 
the true estimate of life if he has not learnt that what 
most men regard as failure may be the most splen- 
did success, and what they regard as enviable success 
may be the most abject of failures. Every young man 
should lay it down as an axiom that : — 

" Self- reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
These three alone lead men to sovereign power." 

In the window of a room in Queen's College, Oxford, 
there is an inscription which records that it was once 
occupied by our young hero-king, Henry V., who is finely 

described as — 

i; Victor hostium kt Sui," 

conqueror not only of his enemies, but of himself. He 
conquered his enemies at Azincourt ; but the conquest of 
himself — the turning of the rout caused by his earlier 
follies into resistance, and of the resistance into victory 
— required a far more earnest struggle. How many 
of the world's laurelled victors have driven their foes 






THE ) NG MAN. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 59 

before them on many a battlefield, and yet have hope- 
lessly succumbed to the domestic foes in their own 
heart ! They have been defeated by their own lower 
self : — 

11 This coward with pathetic voice, 
Who craves for rest and ease, and joys. 
Myself arch-traitor, to myself, 
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe. 
My clog whatever road I go." 

Alexander won the day at Issus, the Granieus, and Ar- 
bela, and founded one of the most colossal and enduring 
of the empires of the world before he was thirty-three 
years old ; yet, hopelessly subdued by his own baser in- 
stincts, the glorious young Greek died as a fool dieth. 
drunken and debauched, at Babylon. Napoleon I. won 
a hundred terrible battles amid all the pomp an 1 cir- 
cumstance of magnificent war ; yet, when he was flung 
to die on a barren Atlantic rock, he was so utterly de- 
void of the most ordinary magnanimity, that he con- 
descended to incessant and ignoble squabbles with Sir 
Hudson Lowe about etiquette and champagnes. On the 
other hand, there have been many men whose outward 
foes have triumphed over them ; on whom death has 
fallen before they were able to see one of their high 
ends accomplished; who have stood pilloried, because of 
th ir goodness, "on Infamy's high stage;" who have 
en led their sad careers amid clouds and thick darkne s. 
i . the dungeon, on the scaffold, or at the stake, — who 
have yet earned the most immortal palms, and for 
whom " all the trumpets have sounded on the other 
side." Is not the life of Christ the eternal type of such 
glorious failures ? And have not the " masters of those 
who know " expressed their adhesion to the supremacy 



60 THE YOUNG MAN. — MASTER OF HIMSELF 

of this ideal ? Who has not heard the universal Chris^ 
tian proverbs, " Via crucis^ via lucis" and " ]STo cross, no 
crown " ? Does not Dante sing : - — 

" For not on flowery beds, nor under shade 
Of canopy reposing, Heaven is won "? 

But let no young man suppose that the Ideal of the 
Cross is .an ideal of abjectness or misery. It is, on 
the contrary, an ideal of glorious supremacy and of a 
permanent blessedness — yes, even of an exultation -- 
which the world can neither give nor take away. The 
worst apparent sufferers in the cause of righteousness 
have felt, in the depths of their anguish, a joy surpass- 
ing the joy of harvest. They have been " contenti net 
fuoco " — " content even in the fire.'' l There has often 
l)3en a radiancy on the faces of martyrs, as they up- 
lifted their trembling hands out of the flames, such as 
has never gleamed beneath the diadems or coronals of 
earthly bliss. And, on the other hand, men who have 
risen from peasants to emperors have re-echoed with 
one voice the Wise King's epitaph of thrice-doubled 
emptiness upon the most consummate splendors of the 
world. They have exclaimed with Tiberius that " all 
the gods and goddesses were continually destroying 
him;" and with Septimius Severus, "Omnia fui et nihil 
expedit" — "I have been everything, and it is all of no 
avail." And why is this ? It is because the only real, 
the only eternal secret of anything which can remotely 
be called happiness, depends in no respect on external 
tilings. The sources of joy and glory lie solely within 
us. If a man's heart be not at peace; if he does not 

1 Dante, "Inferno," i. 1 18. 



THE YOUNG MAX. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 6] 

possess his own approval ; if a peaceful conscience does 
not shed its light upon him — then nothing can make 

him happy. For then he has been, in some way <>r 
other, practically false to his own best impulses and 
purest aspirations, and : — 

" The worst of miseries 
Is when a nature, framed for noblest things, 
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys. 
And. sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life, 
Gasping from out the shallows.'* 

We learn these truths, as we learn all other truths, best 
from Scripture. Our Lord taught us that " a man's life 
consisteth not in the abund; n -e of things that he pos- 
sess ebh " (Luke xii. 15); and St. Paul describes Chris- 
tians as •• having nothing, and yet possessing all things." 

The secret, then, of all happiness, of all nobleness, of 
all true suc:*es>. is self-mastery, self-possession. 

It might well seem strange that our self — the inmost 
secret of our being — all that constitutes our true im- 
mortality, is not given us with ourselves, but has to be 
acquired by us. We have, so to speak, to earn the 
essential reality of our own being. 

Ordinary language shows how little this conception 
is realized. By " self-possession, " in common speech, 
is merely meant that a. man does not exhibit outward 
signs of emotion or alarm at any sudden crisis ; that he 
is master of all facial expression ; that he can conceal 
the agitation or excitement which is shown by others. 
And when society speaks of a youth as being " his own 
master" it only means to say that he has a private in- 
come of his own, and can do what he likes ! 

But the true conceptions of " self-possession ,: and 
•• heing our own masters," so far from these lying on 



62 ~THE YOUNG MAN. —MASTER OF HIMSELF. 

the surface, are connected with the very depths of our 
human nature. 

Our nature is not simple, but complex, and its perfect- 
ness and blessedness consist in the harmonious inter- 
relation of its tendencies and forces. We have acquired 
ourselves when we have learnt to give the supremacy 
to what is best and most eternal within ourselves, and to 
keep in resolute control all base and destructive ele- 
ments within us. 

This truth forced itself even upon the Pagan moral- 
ists, and was seen with marvellous insight especially by 
Plato. 1 He described man as a tripartite being, con- 
sisting of the combination of a lion, a many-headed 
monster, and a man. The lion represents the passions 
of the soul, not necessarily ignoble, but liable to become 
ungovernable, and then destructive. The monster — " a 
multitudinous polycephalous beast, having a ring of 
heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild " — repre- 
sents the lusts of the flesh. The man represents the 
reason. Nothing, says Socrates, is more fatal than " to 
feast the multitudinous monster, and strengthen the 
lion, but to starve and weaken the man." The human 
being has only ^achieved his true destiny when the man 
is absolute sovereign over the lion, controlling all its 
impulses ; and when he has crushed the many-headed 
monster beneath his feet. But it is only the few who 
do not allow the lion and the monster to overthrow and 
tyrannize over the reason, — and then the man becomes 
earthly, animal, demonish. 

Practically, then, every man is living in one of three 
conditions, (1) that of defeat; (2) that of uncertain 
struggle ; and (3) that of secure victory. 
1 Plato, "Republic," ix. p. 588. 



THE YOUXG. MAX. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 63 

1. The condition of absolute human defeat presents 
the spectacle which combines in itself all the most 
terrible mysteries and all the most consummate trage- 
dies of our earthly life. It has many degrees ; it may 
not always imply a total and hopeless abjectness ; but it 
exists whenever a man has allowed himself to become 
the slave of his lowest, and especially of his animal 
impulses. Well may Shakespeare exclaim : — 

" Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, yea, in my heart of hearts." 1 

Many a man is nothing more mr less than "passion's 
slave/' — and there is no servitude more grinding or 
more disastrous. The duty imposed upon us by nature, 
by reason, by conscience, by Scripture, by every voice 
of God without us and within, bids us fight against our 
evil passions, and make them " come to heel by a strong 
will, the servant of a tender conscience/' The man who 
tampers with, who makes concessions to, his lower in- 
stincts, is lost. For we are, as Aristotle said, naturally 
" propense to over-indulgence rather than to modera- 
tion.' 7 2 The only way to master ourselves is to resist 
the beginnings of evil ; to resist the evil inclination at its 
very source ; to crush the unborn serpent in its gleam- 
ing shell. If we dabble with it, if we parley with it, if 
we pamper the devil within us, nothing but a miracle 
of grace can save us. We cannot make harmless " cove- 
nants with death," or safe " agreements with hell." 
For instance, the experience of the world shows the 
enormous strength of sensual impulses ; yet no human 

1 Shakespeare, " Hamlet," iii. 2. 

2 EuKa.Ta0opot £<Tn.ei> 7rpb? a/coAacriai' fxaWov tj Trpb? KOtr/xioTtTa, Aristotle, 

" Rth. N." ii. 8. 8. 



64 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OE HIMSELF. 

being was ever born who could not have lived, as hun- 
dreds of thousands have lived, lives pure and temper- 
ate. But the condition of doing so is resistance ; it is 
to harden ourselves against ourselves ; it is to avail our- 
selves of the divine grace which is freely and always 
within the reach of all w r ho seek it. If a man thinks 
that he can plunge into the rushing and whirling stream 
and not be swept away by it, that he can walk in the 
dark along the edge of the precipice and run no risk of 
shattering fall, that any flow^ery band will be strong 
enough in which to check his full-fed appetites when 
they crash out upon him, " terrible and with a tiger's " 
leaps, he will find, by fatal experience renewed to the 
human- race since the day of — 

" That crude apple which perverted Eve," 

that to encourage temptation is to abandon the true mas- 
tery of self. How can he escape impurity who listens 
to, and is ever recalling to his self-polluted imagination, 
the Siren's song ? who thinks that he may safely defile 
the inner sanctities of his moral being, and yet not 
do so by outward act ? who by impure literature, and 
every other form of unhallowed stimulus, feeds and 
strengthens the very passions which can only be tamed 
into temperance, soberness, and chastity by rigid avoid- 
ance or determined battle ? 

Or take the awful desecration of drunkenness. Can 
there be a more abjectly pitiable spectacle, can there be 
a more fearfully dismantled hulk on the rolling waters, 
or a more ghastly wreck upon life's lonely shore, than 
the habitual drunkard ? He cannot resist a chemical 
product ; he has made himself the negro-slave of a dead 
thing; he has impawned that which is divine within 



THE YOUNG MAX. — MASTER OF UlMSELF. 65 

him to the meanest and loathliest of all the fiends. 
••If the glass of brandy were there," — such a miser- 
able being* has been known to say. — "and between me 

and it blazed up the fires of hell, I am so helpless 
that I should still be forced to put out my hand and 
take it." 

What is this, but demoniacal possession ? What is 
this but the undying worm and the quenchless flame, 
self-introduced, self-kindled in the heart ? 

2. The second, and perhaps the commonest, condition 
is that of undecided straggle. The man who has suf- 
fered the wild beast of the flesh to make its thick, car- 
nivorous roar heard in his sanctuary — the youth who 
has played lovingly with the glittering venomous im- 
pulse which shall soon break into a fiery flying serpent 
— the man who, wilfully ceding to Satan the possession 
even of an inch, has given to the Evil One a right and 
a part within him, and forfeited his part in the Lord 
Jesus Christ — that man has disturbed within him the 
indefeasible autocracy of righteousness. He has ren- 
dered his task very perilous in the warfare which has 
no discharge. It is infinitely easier to stand firm than 
to restore a battle array which has once waveied and 
been gored by inroads of the enemy. It is far easier 
to win the battle than to check the rout. This was the 
fatal experience depicted by St. Paul : •• To will is pres- 
ent with me, but to do that which is good is not. So 
the good which I would, I do not ; but the evil which 
I would not, that I practice. But if what I would not 
that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwell- 
eth in me. With the mind I serve the law of God ; but 
with the flesh the law of sin. Wretched man that I 
am! who shall deliver me ou1 of the body of this 



66 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 

death?" (Rom. vii. 18-25). It is the confession of 

Ovid : — 

" Vider meliora, proboque 
Deteriora sequor." 1 

It u the exclamation of Louis XIV. : " I know those 
two men," when Massillon had been depicting the old 
man and the new man who exists within each one of us. 
All men must feel that though "the angel holds us by 
the hand/' yet "the serpent has us by the heart." This 
explains the painful phenomenon of inconsistency. It 
accounts for the sudden frightful revelation of evil in' 
the conduct of men who had passed for good. It ac- 
counts for the frequent phenomenon of sudden exposure 
and ruin in the case of men who, all their lives long, 
had seemed to be walking in the odor of sanctity. In 
many a man there are those two men. — the Adam and 
the Christ. 

"He seemed nietli ought to live two lives in one, 
One busied still with matter to be done, 
While one apart sat on a sentry tower 
Watching the moral world." 

And then, in the quaint words of Tennyson : — 

'"The piebald miscellany, man, 
Bursts of great heart, and slips in sensual mire." 

3. The third condition alone represents the supreme 
of man, — the condition of settled victory in which a 
man, in armed and peaceful watchfulness, has achieved 
a secure and tranquil empire over himself by having 
attained the decisive victory over the passions of the 

1 Ovid, " Metamorphoses," vii.; cf. Euripides, " Medea." 1078: — 

" teat (j-a.v( n ;ut ftev ola. 6pav fieWdi - 



THE YOUNG MAN. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 07 



soul and the lusts of the body which are the signs of 

his moral affinity to the tiger and the ape. This is the 
condition of those whom in the Apocalypse St. John 

describes as the radiant company oi* the pure and unde- 
nted, who. in white robes, and with palms in their 
hands, follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These 
are they whom Plato describes as following the winged 
car of Zeus, and the twelve greater gods within the 
sphere of heaven, not like the rest which are lamed, 
and have their wings broken as they sink downwards 
through the violence of their chariot steeds, and strug- 
gle and trample on one another. 1 

The poets, who are ever the greatest of our moral 
teachers, have constantly,, and in all ages, dwelt on 
the happiness and glory of these victors over them- 
selves. 

So sings Virgil : — 

" Felix qui potuit rerun) cognoscere caussas 
Qui que metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum 
Subjeeit pudibus, strepitamque Acherontis avari." 

So Dante, to whom, as the reward of all his constancy 
and the issue of all his heart-shaking visions. Virgil 
says : — 

" Thy judgment is now tree, correct, and sound. 
And tbou wouldst err didst thou not do its bidding, 2 
I crown and mitre thee over thyself." 

So Shakespeare : — 

'• I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is 
bestial:' 1 

1 Plato. •• Phaedrus," 246 E. 

- Dante. " Purgatory," xxvii. 14C 143 : •'Perch io te sopra te cor- 
e mitrio." 



68 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 
So Fletcher : — 

" Man is his own star; and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all life, all influences, all fate, 
Nothing to him falls early, or too late: 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fateful shadows that walk "by us still." 

So Sir Henry Wotton : — 

" How happy is he born or taught, 

That serveth not another's will, 
Whose armour is his honest thought, 

And simple tru+ his only skill, 
Whose passionb . >t his masters are, 

Whose soul is still prepared for death, 
Untrod unto the world by care 

Of public fame or private breath, 
This man is free from servile bands 

Of hope to rise, or fear to fall, 
Lord of himself, though not of lands, 

And having nothing, yet hath all." 

So Milton, in prose : — 

" He that holds himself in reverence and due esteem both for 
the dignl;,v of God's image upon him and for the sign of His 
redemption w.uich he thinks to be marked visibly upon his fore- 
head/accounts himself a free person to do the noblest and godliest 
deeds." 

So Wordsworth, of the man — 

"Who, with a toward or untoward lot, 
Prosperous or adverse, to his wisli or not, 
Plays, in the many games of life, that one 
Where what he most doth value must be won. 
This is the happy warrior; this is he 
Whom every man in arms would wish to be." 

So Coleridge : — 

"J lath he not always treasures, always friends, 

The good great man? Three treasures — life, and light, 
And calm thoughts innocent as infa its' breath, 



THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 69 

And three firm friends more sure than Day or Nig] t 
Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death." 

So Matthew Arnold : — 

"O air-horn voire! Ions: since, severely clenr. 
A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear. 
Resolve to he thyself: and know that he 
Who finds himself loses his misery." 

So Cloilgh : — 

"Seek seeker in thyself, and thou shalt find 
In the stones bread, and life in the blank mind." 

S ) Sir Lewis Morris : — 

"Take thou no thought for aught save truth and right, 

Content, if such thy fate, to die obscure : 
Wealth palls and honours, fame may not endure. 

And noble souls soon weary of delight. 
Live steadfastly. Be all a true man ought, 

Let neither pleasures tempt, nor pain appal; 
Who hath this he hath all thing's having nought. 

Who hath it not hath nothing, having all." 

And so another : — 

" Be your own palace, and the world's your, Jan." 

So Tennyson : — 

"I envy not the beast that takes 
His license in the fields of Time. 
Unfettered by the sense of crime. 
In whom a conscience never wakes." 

We may be quite sure beforehand that the first enun- 
ciation of a truth so striking and so necessary as this 
will be found in Scripture ; and our Lord uttered it in 
thp most concise yet pregnant form. In the Authorized 
Version the words read. "In your patience possess ye 
your souls "(Luke xxi. 19V But the word for "p< 
sess " is KTaaOac, and the verse should be rendered, "In 
vour patienop ye shall win your souls. " Possession of 



70 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 

ourselves is not spontaneously bestowed upon us ; it 
is a dominion which each man has to gain by labor and 
sore struggle. 

And how is he to acquire it ? 

There is no answer but the old, old answer. A new 
answer, an original [answer, would be a false one. The 
answar is best given in the pages of the old Book, ever 
old, yet ever new, which our mothers taught us. It is, 
" Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation." It is 
• ; Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of 
the flesh." The body of man may become frightfully 
depraved, — it may be turned from a sanctuary into a 
charnel-house, full of dead men's bones and all unclean- 
ness ; it may be desecrated from a shrine into a haunt 
of demons, abode of goats and satyrs, and every obscene 
thing. The soul of man may be degraded from a home 
of noble virtues into a cage of unclean beasts. But the 
spirit of man can never be polluted. It may be grieved ; 
it may be quenched ; it may be stifled within us ; but 
perverted it cannot be. For it is divine ; it is eternal ; 
it is God within us, and that whereby we have affinity 
with God. But the dove cannot fly in unclean places, 
nor can the Holy Spirit abide in a polluted heart. It 
requires thus a constant prayer, a constant effort, to 
keep the heart pure. St. Paul was " the man of the 
third heaven," the " heaven-treader," as the Greek 
Church calls him ; yet even St. Paul says, " This one 
thing I do, forgetting those things that are behind, and 
stretching forth unto those things that are before, I 
press towards the mark of the prize of my high calling 
in Christ Jesus ; " " so run I not as uncertainly ; and 
tight I not as one who beateth the air [with hypocritie 
feints], but I blacken ray body with blows [~L>7roJ7ria£w] 



THE YOUNG MAN. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 71 

and lead it about as a slave [ Sou Aaywyw], lest, by any 
means, after that I have preached to others, I myself 
should be rejected." 

We see, then, that victory is only for the resolute and 
the brave. How long and how severely did the Greek 
wrestler and the Roman gladiator train themselves, as do 
the modern competitors in athletics at this day ! How 
careful was their abstinence, how rigid their diet, how 
regular their exercises ! If they could thus deny them- 
selves, and control themselves, to win a corruptible 
crown, how much more should we do it to win the 
crrecfxivos d/xapai/rij/os, 1 the crown woven of heaven's un- 
fading amaranth ? And it depends, under God, upon 
ourselves. "I confess it is my shame," says the weak 
debauchee, "but it is not in my virtue to amend it." 
'• Virtue ! a fig ! " truly answers the resolute scoundrel. 
" 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus. Our 
bodies are gardens to the which our wills are garden- 
ers ; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set 
hyssop and weed up thyme, supply, it with one gender 
of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it 
sterile with idleness or manned with industry, why the 
power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. 
If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason 
to prize another of sensuality, the blood and baseness 
of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous 
conclusions ; but we have reason to cool our raging mo- 
tions, our carnal stings, our unbitten lust. 

And let no young man say, " Alas ! it is all too late ! 
I have sold myself already, and for naught. I cannot 
dislodge from my enslaved soul the demons to whom, as 

1 1 Pet. V. 4: *o/A(.€if70€ rot' afiapdvTivov rfi<; 60^175 <ttz<$>*x-ov. 



72 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 

to strong men armed, I have betrayed the fortress. 
Almost as far as I can look back, even in days when 
the clearness of memory is lost in the mists of 'the 
dark backward and abysm of years/ I have been un- 
faithful. The crown has fallen from my head, for I 
have sinned.*' Let every youth indignantly expel these 
soft pleadings of despondency ! They are snares of the 
Devil. Fight on, even if at sad moments it seems to 
you as though your fights were all defeats. Eepentance, 
it has been said, is the younger brother of Innocence 
itself. Ah, how those two brothers differ ! The elder 
brother, Innocence, is bright and strong and ruddy and 
beautiful and happy ; the younger, Eepentance, is pale, 
with withered features and downcast eyes and shaking 
hands. He often has to rescue a captive shut up in a 
lost self, that dungeon without iron bars, — a captive 
bound with fetters which are none the less heavy be- 
cause they clank not and are invisible. But God who 
makes can remake, and who created can rescue. The 
task of Repentance^ is ten times harder than that of 
Innocence. It is ten times harder to break old habits, 
to recover lost ground, to rally the shamed and defeated 
soldiers of lost battles. Yet Eepentance, by God's 
grace, has again and again Avon the most splendid vic- 
tories in human lives. jSTo living man is lost; while 
there is life there is hope. Sin is never a necessity, 
even when it has hardened into habit and petrified into 
character. Observe that Hope is a virtue as well as a 
grace. " Thou art wearied in the greatness of thy way. 
Yet saidst thou not, There is no hope.'* Had not St. 
Cyprian lived a thoroughly worldly and godless pagan 
life ? Yet in middle age he became a saint of God, and 
underwent that transformation of character which he 



THE YO UXG M. I N. — MA S TE R F II IMS E L F. 7 3 

had deemed to be impossible. Had not St. Augustine 
lived through a corrupt boyhood, a sensual youth, an 
enslaved manhood ? yet did he not become " a new 
creation ? " 

Not one of you is so fallen into evil as to be unre- 
deemable. Christ, if you seek him, if you rally every 
force within you to obey his will, Christ can restore 
your sight, can strengthen your palsy, can touch your 
leprous soul into pure health again. You are a sinner 
now, — tied and bound with the chain of your sins, — 
but Christ can roll off from you the strangling load and 
set you free, and you may yet die a holy man. 

"Can it be true the word lie is declaring? 

Oh, let us trust him, for his words are fair! 
Man, what is this? and why art thou despairing? 
God shall forgive thee all but thy despair." 

There w r ould be very much more to say on this great 
subject, but I conclude with one word on the supreme 
blessedness of self-conquest. 

It may be measured by the shame and anguish of a 
disintegrated, a dual individuality, a reed shaken by the 
wind, a life swayed hither and thither by opposing in- 
fluence, a character composed of : — 

"Pulses of nobleness, and aches of shame." 

To the undecided and the defeated, God has given their 
hearts' desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls. 
They have plucked Dead Sea apples and are poisoned ; 
they have clutched at bubbles which have burst at 
their touch. Old age leaves them like a boat which 
has struck upon a bank of mud in a fast-ebbing tide, 
which for them can flow no more. Their bodies are 



74 THE YOUNG MAN.— MASTER OF HIMSELF. 

their prison-house. Their self-destroyed self clings to 
them lik$ a NessttS-shirt of agony which they think 
that they can never tear off. Such a man carries about 
with him, wherever he goes, his own punishment for- 
ever. Which way he flies is hell ; himself is hell. He 
is, as one said who knew what it meant by grim ex- 
perience : — 

" Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." 

On the other hand, he who has attained, to self-mas- 
tery " has his own self for a better possession and an 
abiding," The old copyists failed to understand the 
depth of grandeur of that passage of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews (Heb. x. 34). They altered it into a meaning, 
true indeed, but much less profound and original, by 
writing, as in our Authorized Version, u knowing in 
yourselves [cv eavrols'] that ye have in heaven a better 
and an enduring substance." The text and version are 
trebly faulty. The verse really consoles the suffering 
Hebrews in the midst of poverty and persecution, and 
accounts for their joy amid it all, by saying that they 
exulted in mercy and good works, " learning [by these 
very trials] to recognize that ye had your oiun selves for 
a better possession than all the earthly goods of which 
they had been spoiled, and an abiding possession of 
which neither earth nor hell could ever rob them." 
That possession is the spiritual, the eternal life, over- 
arched by the inward azure of that peace which no 
earthly clouds can darken. Even a heathen could feel 
something of this dignity. In one of Seneca's tragedies 
an aged attendant is pointing out to Medea the hope- 
lessness of her fortunes : — 



THE YOUNG MAX. — MASTER OF HIMSELF. 75 

4< Abiere Colchi, conjugis nulla est fides; 
Nihilque superest, opibus e tantis, tibi," — 

'• Y'our husband is faithless, your soldiers have gone, 
your wealth is scattered ; what remains to you ? " — ''Me- 
dea superest" "Medea still remains to me," is the mag- 
nificent reply. I am still myself. He who has mastered 
himself stands on the sunlit hills above the storms. 
Fortune can strip him of all outward resources, but not 
of himself, not of the unconquerable will. The tree is 
still a tree, with all the potentialities of life within it. 
though the whirlwind have stripped away its leaves. 

" Old age hath yet his honour and his toil: 
Death closes all; but something ere the end. 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done." 

Therefore let every youth aim, first of all, and most 
of all, at self-mastery. Without it, he must be base 
and miserable ; with it, he cannot but be happy. With- 
out it, other things are but " gifts of the evil genii 
which are curses and disguise." With it, he is God's 
child, the possessor of blessedness now, the heir of 
eternal happiness hereafter. Without it he will have 
nothing to give back to the God who made him but 
"the dust of his body and the shipwreck of his soul ; " 
with it, he has fulfilled the highest ends of his being, 
and shall have life for evermore. 



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